Automatic Chemistry - Periodic Table of Videos
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 5 июл 2024
- The Professor shares some of his own research in the field of self-optimized chemical reactions... Letting a computer do all the "boring" work.
You can download the paper for free until May 31... Details at periodicvideos.blogspot.com/20...
More chemistry at www.periodicvideos.com/
Research supported by the EPSRC 
Наука
![Sean Rii, Karyon, Sharzkii - Taungule [My Love] (Official Visualizer)](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/eJoMuypbSzQ/mqdefault.jpg)
![Eminem - The Death of Slim Shady [Album Trailer]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/X0HIrS6kUYI/mqdefault.jpg)
This method really excites me. I am a Chemical Engineering and Biochemistry double major and this is right up my alley.
i wonder how many of your videos start with the professor being exited
As a chemical engineer who works with computer modelling, optimization and control I really enjoyed this video. It presses all my buttons! Good work!
Dear Martyn Polyakoff,
I haven't left a single video you have published unwatched. I think it is incredible how you have educated millions of people you don't know yet simultaneously making the world a better place. Thank you.
I wish you further success and hope you continue on your path happily.
Mohammed, a subscriber.
Is this process subject to local maxima? Or does it do some random probing to limit the odds of ending up in a hole?
I was at a conference in Utrecht, where the Professor talked about this research. It was really interesting, thank you for that. Congratulation on the paper!
Brady, it's great that you're showing more of the different professors' individual research projects (first Dr. Moriarty and now this)... you should do more of these!
"It takes the boredome out of doing chemistry"
"Well, maybe I like the boredom of doing chemistry"
This is my second view of this video. I know this comment comes months after the release of this video, but I feel compelled to comment! Great work! I had a similar idea years ago, but the technology was not mature then. So I did it the old-fashioned way, as you described. Boring!
This method also has the advantage that after optimizing the conditions of the reaction, the same apparatus could be used on a preparative scale to prepare as much as you want. Throwing in the CO2 is also ingenious!
this guy is brilliant... bravo to the research team and all that help put this production on. The general public finally gets to see science in action.
He mentioned this in his lecture at a symposium in Utrecht a couple of weeks ago. HIs talk made my day, it was awesome!
Love the enthusiasm coming from him. He's just excited for science!
I love recursive processes (and your animated diagram)! But this is the first time I have seen recursion at work in chemistry. There is something beautiful about it that transcends chemistry or any particular discipline. Thank you for this!
Man, that's a good bit of kit. Great team work and great results. Well done.
i cant believe someone hasnt thought of this sooner! its really the most essential thing i can think of now that you have made it! very well done.
I love the Professor's enthusiasm!
the proffessor is one of those few people who i can just tell loves what he does truly and purely. good to see a person like that they're hard to come by=)
Congratulations on achieving such a system! Loved it!
Beautiful explanation of the gas chromatograph. Some collegues at my school will be very glad to see this video that will help with their project.
...and congratulations to the team on publishing this paper.
Your use of computer technology in the lab is astonishingly brilliant and of course its chemistry if you are advancing knowledge about matter. Chemical engineering is focused on applied chemistry in the economic world, which doesn't seem to be the primary role of universities.
I love the professor's symmetrical hand movements!
So you have discovered the power of evolution when linked to the concept of feedback. Congratulations on your publication, I hope your methods will be adopted to make all our lives better.
Congratulations to you and your team professor! :)
Just finished reading the paper, very informative and most of it is understandable even to an A-level student like myself. lets just hope that not long down the line the research uncovers a way of getting the E factor to 0kg, that would truly revolutionise the chemical industry as we know it.
Excellent work, professor!
I am so smitten with this type of science.... sometimes i wish I wasn't in the US and could visit you guys
I'm excited too. I love to see applied solutions creating greater efficiency.
Wow, chemistry and computer science: my two favorite sciences together!
When I was at school, for a while I couldn't quite decide whether to specialize in one or the other; I finally decided for computer science because it's easier and cheaper to practice at home as a hobby. You can download open source SDKs for free, but you can't download chemicals for free. ;-)
Good Honest Professor if you ask me.
I love the professor, I want to live with him and do chemistry every day.
I love this video so much. This is exactly how I want to do science.
I'm a chemical engineering student and this just made my day!~
Something done in 1-2 days that normally takes 80 days. Wow, a +80X boost for man-kind! Awesome stuff! Do I smell a Nobel in the professor's future? :D
Great breakthrough professor!
Congratulations to all of you for getting this paper published!
Clever, clever... letting a computer ring the changes instead of by hand. The wonders of the Computer Age! Along with a lot of human teamwork...
@periodicvideos thanks, Im planning on doing Chemistry at nottingham assuming i can get in, only doing a/s now
I'm waiting for the paper to appear on web of science, it sounds like it will be a good read. Like a feedback loop for reaction conditions! Very interesting!
you guys are going to get a freakin nobel prize for this!
As he talked about how long it took to find optimal conditions the Computer Scientist in me was thinking about a Fuzzy Logic setup that would do that for him. The next step would be to use either a Neural Net setup or a Genetic Algorithm setup in combination with multiple sets of lab equipment to speedup the time it take to calculate optimal reaction conditions.
Well, before a large company constructs something to do this for a given technique and for given applications, who comes up with it first? Even if the technique of self adjustment of the conditions, while certainly already available for many conditions and specific products, for the specific technique and or products, it still has to be thought of, proven by, and implemented by a researcher. Maybe he's the first for this specific process, or he's discovered some new system of optimization.
Prof. Pol is awesome!
It would then also be very interesting to create an knowledge database with the results of lots of reactions, that way even if you didn't know what the optimal conditions where to start with, you could tell the database for the characteristics of what you had and wanted to produce, it would then give you a suggestion on what it thinks is the best conditions.
I think the brilliance of it isn't in the scale that you can move it up to, but coming back to the "green" side of things, you're compressing 80 or so days of experimentation down to 1 1/2 days. That's basically 78 or so days where you're not having to keep all this equipment running, possibly idling a lot of the time. You're also then saving energy on heating, lighting, etc.
So for nothing else, you're making a massive energy saving just through making the experiment much faster.
just used the same gas chromatograph machine today (we call it the russian technology). Very interesting research, maybe I will read it on science direct if I find it there. I was wandering if you had some information about micro emulsions or some interesting books that you would recommend about the matter. Keep up the good work.
Again computers make us feel like we're cheating. The use of carbon dioxide as a solvent for this device could be really big. Great Job.
I figured the world-renowned creators of Periodic Videos would have a sweet instrumentation lab. It looks just as old and dilapidated as the one we use down here in Tennessee :(
Either way congratz on getting published!
Finally, you suggest that the algorithms be tuned to optimized other variables, such as the E factor.
Even more interesting, IMHO, is the fact that the whole economics of chemical production could be optimized as well. A scenario in which production costs go down, the E factor is minimized, etc. is not utopic. Medicine costs would inevitably go down, which would be a welcomed relief.
Or combinatorial chemistry optimization leading to better drug discovery. Or....
Thank you so much and congratulations!
It would be interesting to compare the degree of optimization achieved by two different, but very similar, algorithms. The first, using the most precise physical chemistry equations known to date, against the second, using a less rigorous set of equations.
E.g. compare the efficiency of an algorithm using a virial equation of state to one using Van der Waals' or the perfect gas law. One set of "basic" equations vs one set of "state-of-the-art" others.
Wow you have some kind of gear in there. What make is that pump pushing the pentanol mix? Is that a waters binary pump?
I have a friend who works at an ashphalt plant; he'd be delighted to hear about this! It would certainly speed up development! P.S. the editing was a bit sloppy, particularly the bit where the Professor waves his arm to reveal the computers processing the data; that cut was a bit premature.
Good work! What do you use for software? Home grown?
@Xerotaerg its ok, it is often difficult to put the correct emphasis into text
Congrats professor
@periodicvideos Absolutely! I love "gadget" videos. Even better, I love "how it works" videos about those gadgets.
Ever think of explaining how a gas chromatograph works? It's the only piece of equipment in the lab where I work that I don't completely understand.
I would have thought that large chemical companies would already have a process like this that automatically adjusts the equipment to produce the largest volume of the desired chemical as quickly as possible.
Great job, guys!
@nellux On larger scale, optimised processes are the normal. Doing it in the lab is difficult.
I've seen almost all of these, but I really liked this one..
Probably because of all the gadgets being described.
The self-optimizing approach called to mind something that may be of interest. Since I can't post a URL in this comment, here's a quote from the Cornell Computational Synthesis Laboratory:
"Eureqa (pronounced "eureka") is a software tool for detecting equations and hidden mathematical relationships in your data. Its goal is to identify the simplest mathematical formulas which could describe the underlying mechanisms that produced the data. Eureqa is free to download and use."
What optimisation algorithm did you use? It looks like gradient descent or simplex to me from what I see in the video. Are chemistry problems always convex or how do you prevent getting stuck in local minima?
Did you use a hillclimbing algorithm searching local maxima, assuming (probably correctly) that there is just one optimum in the search space?
What use to take days by a lowly graduate student is now done in a day and a half by a machine. Even highly educated work is being automated. Progress Marches On.
I'm proud of you too!
An interesting concept would be a series of these machines.
The first machine can take raw elements and create basic compounds - which then feeds into other similar machines that make ever-more complex substances. And so it continues.
Creating a generic product-manufacturing machine - a very primitive version of Star Trek's "replicator" technology.
You just load it up with raw elements and then tell the computer "I want aspirin" or "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot" and it's automatically created.
Why is the instrument so dirty? I suppose when I worked with HPLC there were all sorts of leakage problems that periodically popped up, and a system pumping super-critical CO2 would have similar problems, but did no one bother to clean it up?
was the software that runs all this specifically developed by Nottingham as well or is it off the shelf stuff? im a programmer and would have loved to be part of a project like this.
What was the chemical you were synthesizing supposed to be used for?
out of interest, how is the output from the GC quantified into a yield and then communicated back to the machine?
@nellux Now that I have read the paper I can comment more freely. What exactly is going on was not immediately clear.
On the paper: In the laboratory there are a lot of degress of freedom; sometimes the only constraint is money. That is why at lab scale reaction yields etc are better than at industrial scale. You get better micxing for eg and better reactions. At industrial scale the degrees of freedom are much less.
@periodicvideos who manages the you tube channel?
@periodicvideos Aww. The paper has restricted access =( I would have loved to read it though!
What if you have a massive network of these rigs feeding into one another in various ways, all controlled from a single computer. Imagine the things you could do and the time-frames you could do them in.
@periodicvideos are you able to post a copy of it somewhere forus to read for free?
The computer run chemical reaction likely uses a variant form of evolutionary optimization.
I mean, you vary the conditions and reward the best results...
Evolution can do that :P
@KlaxonCow Cool, figured there'd be a nifty name for it. Funny thing is I do actually know the term, I just forgot it when I posted the comment.
Does the optimization technique ensure that a global optimum is found? I wish the paper wasn't behind a paywall--I'd love to see the optimization algorithms.
@riveness that sounds more right. why is it so hard to scale down?
What intrigues me even more is why people (see comments) are amazed by this paper. Meiz79's comment is a great example of how poorly the general public understands chemistry's place in science, its gifts to humankind.
@Meiz79 Whatever problem you can think of can be dealt with by science.
... so the big breakthrough must then be the software you are using?
great
@CommonRaven because, that isn't boring....
amazing invention! but why prof's name has an asterisk (*) in the paper?
Are you guys using MATLAB for the program?
@juanarruti Math and prep; what you've always done.
are you nottingham or nottinghan trent?
Were those diagrams made with R?
whoops, editing glitch at 5:24.
Otherwise, finally some electronics from Nottingham. :)
Science by trial and error- I love it.
Super Critical CO2 is a fascinating new branch of chemistry.
But the practical Lab work is what I'm good at :(
What is super critical?
I swear. If you flapped your hands and arms any faster you would have been airborne. So you must have had a great discovery.
Well done! Congats :)
The setup seems pretty simple. I guess the magic is in the software?
perfect "experiment" to try an evolitionary algorithm
Congrats Professor! (I know I'm a bit late...)
nice job :D
what will us undergrads do now???
Ditto.